Just confirming the upgrade to 0.19.12 was successful, if a bit slower than anticipated.

Apols for the downtime, but hey we didn't have to restore a database this time - great success!

Hi all,

Some scheduled Maintenance so we can feed the hamsters that power the server on their little wheel.

While we're doing that, we'll also update to the latest lemmy version, 0.19.12.

Site will be offline for a small period, and may come up and down during this process.

Thanks

Demigodrick

Hi All,

As the Fediverse continues to expand, we're looking at other platforms we can run with our ethos - open federation, user choice, and fair moderation.

We've seen lots of talk about Piefed, and the benefits of the platform, such as better moderation, combining multiple communities into topics i.e piefed.zip/topic/cats, and the ability for users to better control their own experience.

To that end, we've decided to run our own Piefed instance, located at piefed.zip (I know, original!)

This is very much still under construction, but we feel is now able to accept new users, should anyone wish to join.

If you're interested please check it out, or feel free to ask any questions!

PS - this doesn't affect our Lemmy instance in any way.

Hello all,

10th June 2025 marks Lemmy.zip's second birthday!

Following the whole Reddit API fiasco in 2023, many of us moved over to Lemmy, and have never looked back. I remember sitting at my desk (it was a Sunday morning, it was probably raining, it was roughly 10am and I was actually supposed to be somewhere else) and buying the domain, wondering how on earth I was actually going to get a real website working.

It has taken a LOT of learning and perseverance, but since then we've created a fantastic community full over people from all over the world, and Lemmy.zip continues to grow and develop.

As I said in last year's birthday post, running a Lemmy instance has it's ups and downs - some days nothing goes wrong and for a large period of this last 12 months we've had a really stable site, which has led to me even at times referring to things as "too quiet". Oh how I miss those days 😭

But even with all the struggles over the last few months (spam, server issues, lemm.ee's closure) - I have been humbled by all the support and well wishes from users across the fediverse.

This year we've grown to over 4000 registered users, doubled the admin team, and learned loads along the way.

I've highlighted some of this year's happenings in our Year Two microsite: yeartwo.lemmy.zip. (PS - if you're on mobile, you can rotate your device to read it easier!)

You can also see the Year One microsite here if you're curious.

Looking forward in to year 3, I am hoping that Lemmy.zip can continue to thrive, and can become a home for anyone in the fediverse. It's sad to see instances closing, but I am hopeful we can provide a refuge and a space that in time, others can also call home.

None of this is of course possible without YOU. Yes you, reading this.

To the mods, thank you for doing a fantastic job of moderating your communities. There are a wide range of voices that contribute to Lemmy.zip, and your abilities to manage this fairly and consistently are what makes so many communities a success.

To those who have donated, you really are the backbone of keeping Lemmy.zip alive. Each donation means so much to us, and gives us hope that this is a project that many believe in and want to support.

And importantly, to the Lemmy.zip users - I know I always say this, but you make this whole site worthwhile. And I really mean it. Even if you are a lurker, just being a part of this actually means so much to us.

Happy Birthday Lemmy.zip 🍻

Hello all!

To celebrate Lemmy.zip turning 2 years old, we are once again hosting a small giveaway to say thank you for being here ❤️

We're giving away 3 prizes to 3 lucky winners. This will be 1 x £25 Steam gifts, and 2 x £10 Steam gifts.

The giveaway will be open for 48 hours from 12:00 UTC on the 10th June 2025, to 12:00 UTC on the 12th June

You can enter by making a comment in this very thread! Your comment can say or be absolutely anything you want (within reason!)

Once you've made a comment, you should get a message back from ZippyBot confirming you've entered and a ticket number. For transparency, at the end of this we'll publish the entry list and ticket numbers.

You must be a Lemmy.zip user to enter (comments from anyone else will be ignored!) and you will need a Steam account and be happy to send me your username so I can gift you the value via Steam. Your Lemmy.zip account must have been created before the 9th June 2025.

At the end of the giveaway, I'll lock the thread and Zippy will pull three random entries. The first username pulled will win the first prize (£25), and the other two users will win the other prizes (£10).

I've put a few FAQs in this spoiler tag if you want to know more:

---

FAQs - PLEASE READ!

FAQs

• Q) Can anyone enter?
• A) You must be a lemmy.zip user, have a steam account, and your lemmy.zip account must have been created before 9th June 2025

---

• Q) Can I have a giftcard for a different platform, i.e. xbox or playstation?
• A) Unfortunately not. Those platforms (to my knowledge) don't allow me to purchase a giftcard in the UK and you activate it anywhere in the world. Steam allows currency conversion on gifts.

---

• Q) How quickly will I get my prize?
• A) Steam requires that someone must be on a user's friend list for 3 days before giftcards can be sent, therefore I will share my Steam profile with the winners (or vice versa) and after 3 days of being friends on Steam, I will send the gift over. (Unless you live in the UK, in which case I can send you a code within 24 hours)

---

• Q) I think my entry was valid, but I didn't get a reply from Zippybot with my ticket number. What do I do?
• A) Send me a message asap! You can try commenting again too.

---

• Q) Are Lemmy.zip user donations funding this?
• A) No, just making it clear here that the donations to Lemmy.zip only ever go towards the server and Lemmy.zip infrastructure. The funds for this are coming from my wallet :)

---

• Q) How does Zippy select the winners?
• A) Zippy randomly shuffles the list of entrants in the DB. It then randomly shuffles the list again in Python. Then it randomly selects 3 winners from that double shuffled list. You can see the code for this here.

---

• Q) What if something goes wrong?
• A) If for any reason something goes wrong during the giveaway, it will be paused until it can be resumed. If too much time lapses, the giveaway will be restarted.

Hello to all of our new users.

I wish we could all meet in better circumstances. The closing of lemm.ee is a real blow to the fediverse, and I have nothing but the greatest respect for the lemm.ee admin team. Lemm.ee was a cornerstone of the lemmy community, and set a high bar for moderation and technical performance.

Finding a home on the fediverse can be tough. Whether you're here to lurk, post, moderate, or contribute in your own way, we’re glad you’ve joined us. Lemmy.zip might not replace what was lost, but we hope it can become a lemmy instance where you can feel at home.

---

Everyone should receive a welcome PM when they sign up to Lemmy.zip from the ever-present dark lord overseer friendly bot, ZippyBot. However, in case poor Zippy has been overworked and forgotten to send the PM to you, here's some helpful information regarding Lemmy.zip!

• All of our policies can be found at legal.lemmy.zip. This includes our Code of Conduct. Please (please!) have a read of this. Our number 1 rule is Remember the human! (no harassment, threats, etc.). We absolutely adhere to this. Treat people with respect.

• When you created your account, we set up some "Default Blocks". If you want a more unfiltered Lemmy experience, you can head to your account settings and remove the blocks. You can read more about this in our Welcome Post - they are currently hexbear and lemmgrad.

• We have monthly updates! You can read the latest one here!. We're always open to suggestions if there's anything else you'd like to see in these.

• We have some metrics around federation for the curious among you. The link is in the sidebar or you can click here!

• We have our status page at status.lemmy.zip. In the unlikely event the server becomes sentient and starts a robot uprising, full details will be available here.

Finally, your admin team is myself (Demigodrick), Sami, Druid, and Gazby. Please reach out to any of us if you feel you need help or support with anything. We also have a support email - hello@lemmy.zip.

---

If you have any questions, please let us know and we'll do our best to answer them.

Thanks,

The Lemmy.zip Admin Team

Hello all!

Firstly, apologies I missed last month's update. As I will go in to during this month's update, the train has not been smooth sailing, the ship missed the station - for a little while, trying to uncover what has gone wrong has been like unraveling a can of worms that has gone off the tracks.

Because of the length of this update, I'm leaving off new communities for this month, but feel free to pop any in the comments you'd like to share!

---

Server Updates

So, I'll begin at the 0.19.11 update for Lemmy. I'd planned in some time for the update, and to begin with things went fairly normally, with usual server updates etc. Then it came time to update Lemmy itself to 0.19.11 - however, instead of the ~10 minutes of suggested downtime, it quickly became apparent that something wasn't quite right. The logs gave no indication of anything happening, and after an hour it became apparent that something hadn't worked. With not much to go on, and all the various logs showing that absolutely nothing had apparently happened, I cancelled the upgrade process and tweaked the logs so I'd get a bit more information than the standard logs usually show. This turned out to be an internal DNS issue, where Lemmy wasn't talking to the database.

So, onwards again I fixed that issue and reapplied the update, to which it had appeared to start working. Excitedly, I give it ten minutes as advised, to come back and see that it was still going.. and going.. and going.. and two hours later it was saying something was still happening. Well, by this point I'd run out of time and trusted in the process that it would resolve itself. I had unfortunately had to go to sleep as I had work the next morning, and a baby to look after.

By the next morning, still nothing. However, I can't SSH in to the server on my phone (nor would I ever want to in case it was stolen etc) and all the backend stuff is behind layers of protection, so the site was down for the day while I had to do real world work nonsense.

By the time I'd got home, it still thought it was ongoing, so I made the decision that likely something was broken and cancelled the update. Of course, letting something go to town for hours on the database meant it was probably ruined, or would require completely investigating - ain't nobody got time for that. So I crossed my fingers and hoped my backup solution had worked which it did with flying colours. I restored the database and the site came back to life.

Of course, I don't like running old versions, so I rescheduled which went much much smoother the second time around, taking 8 minutes. Whew.

!

For a few days, everything looked great. Metrics looked spot on and the site was running like it always was, and then bam - the server completely locked up:

!

A restart did eventually fix this, and things returned to normal, but not quite the same.

On the 24th April, I started getting reports of the site returning various 502 and 504 errors, and also issues with images loading. Broken images has been a feature of the image proxy for a while, but this was on another scale, with sometimes whole pages of broken images and a connection timeout on every refresh. I was, in hindsight, very out of my depth here.

I started trying to see what the cause of the timeouts where, and it became apparent quickly that the site was being hit by previously-unseen levels of traffic:

!

On the above graph, the left hand side was the usual amount of traffic we'd get, and on the right was the new levels we were receiving. This was likely causing the server to effectively be DDOS'd, and uncovering issues with the performance of the server. For a comparison of the usual amount of traffic we get, here's a graph from the last server update: !

Many configs were tweaked. Much database performance monitoring took place. Things were turned off and back on indiscriminately. Unfortunately not much worked.

It was at this point our new Admin, Gazby, joined the team - and quickly got to work diagnosing and fixing so many of the issues.

Some of the changes include much better backups, reduced latency in image storage (the images moved from the USA to EU storage), images being served from i.lemmy.zip to allow for better caching to reduce the load on the server, complete review and tweak of all the configs and server setup, and a detailed list of things we need to work on going forwards (plus no doubt lots of things I am forgetting).

This has really helped to stabilize the site, and while we can see it's not 100% perfect, the amount of 502/504 errors should have massively reduced, and the site should be almost as it used to be.

One of things Gazby has also worked on is reporting and insights into the server, and so for example here's a graph showing the 504 errors today:

!

We've got some plans on the horizon we're working on which should increase the performance of the site, which possibly/probably will include a server move to rule out hardware issues or latent config issues we can't find.

Whatever triggered these issues I am still not sure - it looks like it could be scrapers/AI bots hammering the site, and so we've put some measures in place here. If you use the old front end then you may have noticed a cloudflare challenge to try and prevent the server being overloaded - also a prewarning, the old front end is no longer maintained, and unless someone steps in, it is not compatible with the next version of Lemmy. Therefore at that point it will be retired unless someone works on it to bring it back in line. It is also the cause of a LOT of the server traffic problems, so it probably isn't too much of a bad thing. Maybe someone will rewrite it to be better :)

As it stands, things still aren't perfect - we had an issue where the bit of the server that actually directs you to the right place got overwhelmed, and so we put a fix in for that, but they are hopefully a lot better than they were a couple of months ago.

---

Donations

Lemmy.zip only continues to exist because of the generous donations of its users. The operating cost of Lemmy.zip is over 60 euros a month ($60, £50) and is mostly funded by the community!

We keep all the details around donations on our OpenCollective page, with full transparency around income and expenditure.

If you're enjoying Lemmy.zip, please check out the OpenCollective page, we have a selection of one-off or recurring donation options. All funds go directly to hosting the site and keeping the virtual lights on.

We've also put up a link to our Ko-Fi page where you can donate via paypal instead of using a card. All Ko-Fi donations will be totalled up and added to OpenCollective each month for transparency. I've added a link in the sidebar, but you can also click the image below to go there:

[!](https://ko-fi.com/lemmyzip)

We continue to have some really kind and generous donators and I can't express my thanks enough. You can see all the kind donators in the Thank You thread - you could get your name in there too!

Please remember, traditional social media is only "free" to you because they sell your data. We don't do that - if you want to support independent social websites like this one and you value your privacy, please consider a small donation. It really does help.

---

Graphs

I know you've come for the shiny pictures, so here you go!

CPU over last 30 days: !

RAM over last 30 days: !

Disk space used: !

Here's a few new ones for you! Lemmy DB size: !

Images database size: !

Here's our current actual images stored:

!

Here's the cloudflare overview: !

Here's requests: !

Bandwidth: !

And here is visitors: !

And finally, traffic by country (mostly federation traffic remember!) !

---

So hopefully that fills everyone in on where we're up to, and what we're working on, but if you have any questions please ask away below!

One final thing - on the 10th June, Lemmy.zip turns two years old!! 🥳 🎉 I'm hoping to do something nice for it, similar to last years (which is here if you haven't seen it!) - but a quick thank you to everyone who has been part of the ride so far!

Thanks

Demigodrick

Hi All,

For the past couple of weeks, the site has been struggling with performance issues and some of you will have seen frequent cloudflare 502/504 gateway errors, and images not loading properly.

We've done a lot of work in the background to try and pinpoint what the issue is and have started to narrow down things. Hopefully by this point you're not seeing any of the gateway timeouts anymore, although I would appreciate if you do see one letting me know about it.

I missed May's server update because the little time I have free at the moment has been spent trying to fix the issues, however in the next update I will go over what we've done and whats changed - and we've also got a new admin on the team helping to improve Lemmy.zip in the technical department.

In order to continue with improvements, Images will go offline for a period of time while we shuffle things around in the background.

There will also be a server restart so the site will be inaccessible for a short period of time.

As always you can see the status of the site at status.lemmy.zip

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks

Demigodrick

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005

> An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and I work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Unfortunately the amount of donations has decreased to only 2000€ per month. This leaves only 1000€ per developer, which is not enough to pay my bills. With the current level of donations I will be forced to find another job, and drastically reduce my contributions to Lemmy. To avoid this outcome and keep Lemmy growing, I ask you to please make a recurring donation: > > Liberapay | Ko-fi | Patreon | OpenCollective | Crypto > > If you want more information before donating, consider the comparison with Reddit. It began as startup funded by rich investors. The site is managed by corporate executives who over time have become more and more disconnected from normal users. Their main goal is to make investors happy and to make a profit. This leads to user-hostile decisions like firing the employee responsible for AMAs, blocking third-party apps and more. As Reddit is a single website under a single authority, it means all users need to follow the same rules, including ridiculous ones like censoring the name "Luigi". > > Lemmy represents a new type of social media which is the complete opposite of Reddit. It is split across many different websites, each with its own rules, and managed by normal people who actually care about the users. There is no company and no profit motive. Much of the work is carried out by volunteer admins, mods and posters, who contribute out of enthusiasm and not for money. For users this is great as there is no advertising nor tracking, and no chance of takeover by a billionaire. Additionally there are no builtin political or ideological restrictions. You can use the software for any purpose you like, add your own restrictions or scrutinize its inner workings. Lemmy truly belongs to everyone. > > Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy to keep up with all the feature requests, bug reports and development work. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. Previously I sometimes had to rely on my personal savings to keep developing Lemmy for you, but that can't go on forever. We partly rely on NLnet for funding, but they only pay for development of new features, and not for mandatory maintenance work. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached Dessalines and I can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. Please use the link below to see current donation stats and make your contribution! We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be. > > > Donate

Just wanted to post a quick confirmation that the site has updated to 0.19.11.

I'll be keeping an eye on the site over the next hour or so, but if you notice anything wrong please let me know.

Thanks Demigodrick

Hello all,

Attempt two to update to Lemmy 0.19.11 is now planned in for tomorrow, April 12th at 13:00 BST (that's 12:00 UTC!)

Following feedback from the downtime thread, information can be found on the upgrade in these places:

• Matrix - We have a Matrix space you can join by clicking here. This is likely where I'll be most active during the update.

• Status Page - Following the failure of our old status page to actually detect any downtime, I've swapped to a different status page supplier temporarily while I review the options. Uptime Kuma was great (and free, and self hosted) but let us down. Our status page has now been updated, and I've included the maintenance on there. If there are any unforseen issues, I will add them there.

• Mastodon - I have a mastodon account which you can view by clicking here and I will make a couple of posts here as and when things are happening too. You can get a mastodon.zip account too by clicking here!

There will absolutely be downtime again, but I cannot predict how long this will be. Some sources say 8 to 10 minutes, but during our last attempt the migrations took significantly longer, so it may be a few hours its down for.

Obviously there will be a backup, and if anything does go wrong again then we'll roll back.

Fingers crossed this time :)

Thanks

Demigodrick

Hi All,

As some of you may have realised, the planned upgrade sort of crashed everything, and we had our longest period of downtime since the site began.

This is partly because I had to go to sleep (thanks to a newborn and a job).

The good news is that the backup process worked! We've restored to seconds before the upgrade took the site offline.

The bad news is that federation is likely to be.. wonky.. for a little while. The site may also go up and down while I undo some of the fixes I tried.

Ultimately the issue came down to the upgrade failing (I am not sure why - will be digging into this now the priority is no longer getting the site up) and then the containers not talking to eachother, so the UI wouldn't talk to lemmy, and lemmy wouldn't talk to the database.

I rebuilt the containers, restored the backup, restarted everything, and it's all come back up (admittedly not perfect right now).

Importantly, I want to issue an apology. This isn't what I want for Lemmy.zip, and it should've been handled way better by myself. I'm always learning but this took way longer than it should've, and while I take some solace in the fact the backup process worked and has been proven to work in production, the delay in being able to get this back up is entirely my fault and frankly unacceptable.

I'll be working to document this outage, the steps it took to get it back up, and some form of repeatable plan so a repair can be replicated in the future if I'm not available.

In terms of upgrading to 0.19.11 - I will have to try again soon as it's got some security fixes we desperately need to implement.

Thanks

Demigodrick

Probably a two hour window to give me time to get things done. There may be an upgrade to lemmy 0.19.11 however that requires some modification of ZippyBot due to changes in the new version.

There will be downtime while the server is restarted, however hopefully this is brief.

Thanks

Demigodrick

Hello all,

It's that time of the month again!

Unfortunately we didn't have chance to do an April Fools this year (besides, reality is weird enough in itself) - as mentioned at the end of the last update I was expecting a child, who has safely arrived and is amazing, whilst also ruining my sleep schedule and eating all of my free time!

I am sneaking a few minutes in though, to write this as they sleep!

---

Communities

We've had loads of new communities this month, so I'll highlight certain ones to keep the list a bit more manageable:

• Language Settings
• Fields of Mistria
• Sim Racing
• Foundation
• Planet Coaster
• Kingdoms Reborn
• TF2 Weapon Ideas
• Automation and Factory Builder Games

---

Server Update

In terms of actual lemmy.zip development, things have been a little quieter. We updated to 0.19.10 when it was released - Changelog here, and we've implemented a couple of ways of trying to filter out Nicole PMs. If anything, its pushed me to learn new ways of interacting with Lemmy to harden the moderation support capabilities of Zippy. Before 0.19.10 was released, you may have noticed a PM in your inbox with something along the lines of "Removed by Admin" if Zippy picked up Nicole spam - with the introduction of 0.19.10, PMs are deleted when we ban an account, so you won't need to see that anymore.

And that's it really - Sami and Druid have done a fantastic job keeping on top of applications and mod reports, and hopefully everything will continue to run smoothly :)

I will schedule some small maintenance downtime when I get a chance, but I'll give plenty of notice.

---

Please don't be a lurker!

!Please don't make talk for 25 hours to make you not a lurker

If you’re new to Lemmy.zip - WELCOME! I hope you’re enjoying your time here :)

I am sure that long term readers are bored of reading this now, but it is really is true that the easiest way you can support Lemmy.zip is to actively engage with content here: upvoting content you enjoy, sharing your thoughts through posts and comments, sparking meaningful discussions, or even creating new communities that resonate with your interests.

It’s natural to see fluctuations in user activity over time, and we’ve seen this over the wider lemmy-verse for some time now. However, if you’ve found a home here and love this space, now is the perfect opportunity to help us thrive.

If you want to support us in a different way than financially, then actively interacting with the instance helps us out loads. If you’ve gone to the trouble of creating an account, then come and be part of the Fediverse! Please don’t be a lurker! :)

---

Donations

Lemmy.zip only continues to exist because of the generous donations of its users. The operating cost of Lemmy.zip is over 60 euros a month ($60, £50) and is mostly funded by the community!

We keep all the details around donations on our OpenCollective page, with full transparency around income and expenditure.

If you're enjoying Lemmy.zip, please check out the OpenCollective page, we have a selection of one-off or recurring donation options. All funds go directly to hosting the site and keeping the virtual lights on.

We've also put up a link to our Ko-Fi page where you can donate via paypal instead of using a card. All Ko-Fi donations will be totalled up and added to OpenCollective each month for transparency. I've added a link in the sidebar, but you can also click the image below to go there:

[!](https://ko-fi.com/lemmyzip)

We continue to have some really kind and generous donators and I can't express my thanks enough. You can see all the kind donators in the Thank You thread - you could get your name in there too!

Please remember, traditional social media is only "free" to you because they sell your data. We don't do that - if you want to support independent social websites like this one and you value your privacy, please consider a small donation. It really does help.

---

Graphs

It's all you're really here for anyway ;)

CPU:

!

RAM:

!

Disk space:

!

Image storage:

!

Cloudflare overview:

!

Requests:

!

Bandwidth:

!

Unique visitors:

!

Traffic:

!

---

Apologies, bit of a shorter one than usual, but I am severely sleep deprived! (and will moan about it at every opportunity)

As always please let me know if there is anything you'd like to see me include in these, otherwise I'll be back next month with another one!

Thanks

Demigodrick

I sincerely hope they win

Hello all,

That time of the (shorter) month again!

---

Communities

We've got a couple of new communities for you:

• Autism Memes
• Mod Tools (I'm trying to consolidate all the available mod-specific tools in one place. This is a local-only community for Lemmy.zip too)

---

Server Update

A few things happened this month.

Firstly, the smaller things - We updated to Lemmy 0.19.9 which was quick and easy. We also migrated the image database from Sled to Postgres which was relatively easy once it got going, but was not quick. But that piece of work is done now, and should result in tiny performance improvements now we have so many images.

We also implemented the Geoblock of UK IP addresses (more info here). This took a couple of goes to get it how I wanted it to work, but the UI is now blocked to UK IP addresses, and federation traffic is still allowed to and from the UK.

We've also implemented something I talked about at the end of the last server update, which I am calling "Default Blocks" (for lack of a better name) for new accounts. Basically, when a new account is created, we apply a couple of instance blocks for instances that we get the most complaints about - so far, it's Hexbear (who have recovered their domain if you're interested) and lemmygrad. Lemmy.ml was a candidate too, but there are a lot of bigger communities there and we dont really get complaints/reports from our users about that instance.

The messages a new user gets when they've signed up to Lemmy.zip, and the welcome post it links to, have been updated to reflect this, and give instructions on how to remove these blocks (in the user profile -> blocks) in the same way you'd add/remove any other block (because that's all we're doing in the background). The updated new user post is here, and we're open to feedback if anyone can think of ways to add or tweak it to make it easier for new users.

This way, I think, is the best of both worlds when we're trying to weigh up keeping new people on Lemmy compared against defederation. Obviously we're not an instance that goes wild on defederating because we want people to see the content they want to see, but this can turn some newer people away who likely would've stuck round had the onboarding experience been a little easier and clearer. With default Lemmy, there isn't really an onboarding experience - many instances use the default lemmy experience which is an email to let you know your account has been approved, if they've enabled this, otherwise you're kind of left wondering. One of the things we saw a lot of was after an application was created, the user would try to immediately log in and then reset their password, not realising (nor having read the application text!) that they would have to wait.

This is why we've put so much effort into things like a welcome email, welcome PM linking to various places such as new users posts, how to change the site theme, how to get help if you need it etc, and deny emails if we don't accept an account with the reason why and how to challenge that decision, to name a few.

This also doesn't effect existing users who signed up before we put this into testing, it's something Zippy does to the account as part of the signup process, so it won't change anything for long term accounts - It's just new accounts that will have the blocks applied.

In time, we might extend this if there are more extreme instances popping up. We might also review it for communities too, although that functionality doesn't exist in Zippy yet.

The ultimate aim is to provide a friendlier landing page for new users and an easier transition from other similar sites to Lemmy, without cutting everyone off from that content if they want to partake in it which is what Defederation would do. Defederation would also prevent users from the other instances in taking part in our content, which many do in a fair and rule-following way, and that wouldn't really be something we want to do either. So this is the fairest way we can do this, while still giving the user the choice to remove those blocks at any time as and when they wish to.

As always, happy to answer any questions in the comments.

Finally, I'm trialing out a Mastodon server at mastodon.zip (or click here for a direct invite). At the moment its entirely separate from Lemmy.zip but if it gets used we'll likely bring it under the same banner at some point.

---

Please don't be a lurker!

!Bernie Sanders is asking you, yes you, to not be a lurker on Lemmy

If you’re new to Lemmy.zip - WELCOME! I hope you’re enjoying your time here :)

I am sure that long term readers are bored of reading this now, but it is really is true that the easiest way you can support Lemmy.zip is to actively engage with content here: upvoting content you enjoy, sharing your thoughts through posts and comments, sparking meaningful discussions, or even creating new communities that resonate with your interests.

It’s natural to see fluctuations in user activity over time, and we’ve seen this over the wider lemmy-verse for some time now. However, if you’ve found a home here and love this space, now is the perfect opportunity to help us thrive.

If you want to support us in a different way than financially, then actively interacting with the instance helps us out loads. If you’ve gone to the trouble of creating an account, then come and be part of the Fediverse! Please don’t be a lurker! :)

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Donations

Lemmy.zip only continues to exist because of the generous donations of its users. The operating cost of Lemmy.zip is over 60 euros a month ($60, £50) and is mostly funded by the community!

We keep all the details around donations on our OpenCollective page, with full transparency around income and expenditure.

If you're enjoying Lemmy.zip, please check out the OpenCollective page, we have a selection of one-off or recurring donation options. All funds go directly to hosting the site and keeping the virtual lights on.

We've also put up a link to our Ko-Fi page where you can donate via paypal instead of using a card. All Ko-Fi donations will be totalled up and added to OpenCollective each month for transparency. I've added a link in the sidebar, but you can also click the image below to go there:

[!](https://ko-fi.com/lemmyzip)

We continue to have some really kind and generous donators and I can't express my thanks enough. You can see all the kind donators in the Thank You thread - you could get your name in there too!

Please remember, traditional social media is only "free" to you because they sell your data. We don't do that - if you want to support independent social websites like this one and you value your privacy, please consider a small donation. It really does help.

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Graphs

The bit you all really want to see. All over 30 days unless otherwise stated.

CPU:

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RAM:

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File storage:

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Image storage (lifetime):

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Cloudflate stats - overall:

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Requests:

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Bandwidth:

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Unique visitors:

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Country traffic:

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So that's it for this month - if there is anything else you'd like to see I'm happy to share it if I can.

Next month's update may be late or missing entirely, and I may not be around as much for the next couple of months - I am expecting my first child around March/April and I think I might have slightly less time than I do now for a little bit! :)

The site is in good hands with Sami and Druid, so please do reach out to them or in the matrix chat if you need support with anything.

Thanks,

Demigodrick

Hi All,

Needing to do some image migration, so for a short while images will be offline. Cloudflare might cache a few for a bit, but new posts won't have them.

Quite rare these days I need to do this level of maintenance but hopefully once complete, the site will be a bit speedier and we'll be in a better position long term.

There's currently about 400gb of images so this work should help alleviate some pressure on the system.

Thanks

Demigodrick

Edit: Quick calc says this could take over 8 hours :(

Edit 2: 6 hours later it's 41% done, so my maths is way out. There's like 10 more hours to go? Sigh.